Adam Michnik & Yasmine El Rashidi
“It’s been twenty-five years since the ultimate victory of the Solidarity movement in Poland, a revolution that ultimately led to the fall of communism. Adam Michnik, a Solidarity activist jailed by the Polish communist regime for his dissident activities, and now among Poland’s most prominent public figures, discusses the legacy of that revolution with Yasmine El Rashidi, a young intrepid Cairo-based journalist whose essays and articles on the (unfinished) Egyptian revolution were nominated for an Amnesty International Media Award. Can a velvet revolution offer any useful lessons to a bloody one?

Our bodies do not form a society in a vacuum. They are embedded within a multitude of designed elements of various scales that all participate to a certain degree to these relationships of power. Urban design and architecture often play a tremendous role in exacerbating normative process, but this is also the case of another design element: clothing. Clothes are what Mimi Thi Nguyen calls the “epidermalization” of the public body (see our first conversation for Archipelago): they compose an epidermic surface that comes as an additional layer subjected to recognition and reaction in regard to the norm, as well as normalized expectations regarding the body. This is how a piece of cloth like the hoodie…

Transcribed from the 11 October 2014 episode of This is Hell! Radioand printed with permission. Edited for space and readability. Listen to the full interview:

“The level of brainwashing in America doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world.”

Chuck Mertz: Arundhati Roy is the author of Capitalism: A Ghost Story. The way Arundhati tells it, “capitalism has been a tale of horror for millions of people in India and tens of millions of people around the world. For many, capitalism is not a theory or an idea, but a frightening reality that tears apart their lives every day, and it’s getting worse.”

A few weeks ago, I was asked to write a text for The Fall Semester, an in situ (Miami)and online symposium that occurred last week. I figured that it would be a good opportunity to make a synthesis of my thoughts/maps about the recent Israeli military massacre on Gaza as being ‘only’ a spectacular episode of a continuous siege. There is not much new information for people who had been kind enough to read the articles day by day (listed at the end of this text), but I am hoping that this synthesis could be helpful to others. The Fall Semester’s guest speakers were Nick Gelpi, Jean-François Lejeune, Nick Srnicek, Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Grey Read, Jan Verwoert, Benjamin Bratton, Michael Hardt. Its online contributors were Jason Dittmer, Keller Easterling, Matteo Pasquinelli, François Roche, Nathalie Rozencwajg, Leandro Silva Medrano, Marion von Osten, and myself (each essay can be downloaded on the symposium’s website